[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
This is Padmasana, and I am Brenda Noor.
In a world increasingly driven by data, metrics and tangible outcomes, we often find ourselves disconnected from the deeper currents of human experience.
Today's conversation promises to be a profound exploration of the spaces between scientific understanding and spiritual insight, a journey that challenges our conventional ways of perceiving reality.
Our guest, Ron Frost, brings a unique perspective that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of geological science and spiritual contemplation.
As a professor emeritus of geology and a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Ron has spent decades wrestling with fundamental questions about the nature of existence, consciousness and meaning.
What makes Ron's journey particularly compelling is his commitment to understanding the world around us that lies beyond traditional boundaries.
By participating in the three year Buddhist retreat during which he took temporary monastic vows, he has undertaken a rigorous personal investigation into into the spiritual dimensions of human experience.
His book, the Mystic Spirituality in the Age of Materialism, emerges not as an academic treatise, but as a deeply personal exploration of how we might reconnect with a more holistic understanding of our world.
In our conversation today, we'll delve into Ron's transformative experiences, his critique of materialist thinking, and his insights into the profound commonalities that exist across spiritual traditions.
We'll explore how the linear, reductive approach of scientific methodology might be insufficient when confronting the rich, complex landscape of human consciousness.
For anyone who has ever felt that there must be more to reality than what can be measured or quantified, this conversation offers a refreshing and nuanced perspective.
Ron invites us to expand our understanding, to embrace complexity, and to recognize the mystical currents that flow beneath the surface of our everyday perceptions.
Ron is a professor emeritus of geology at the University of Wyoming. Throughout his career, Ron also studied Tibetan Buddhism. For most of that time, he wrestled with the problem of how to reconcile the material world of science with a spiritual dimension that he knew to permeate the world around us.
To understand this question, Ron participated in the ultimate training in Tibetan Buddhism, the three Year Retreat.
During the retreat years, Ron took temporary ordination as a monk at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. His book is the result of insights that he received during the retreat and has reflected on since.
In the book, Ron, who is one of the few scientists who has participated in the three year retreat, addresses the prevailing spiritual malaise of modern society.
The book has two major theses.
First is that science, which deals well in studies of the physical world, can say nothing about the spiritual dimension.
Second is that the linear or either or thinking of science, which is necessary for studying physical processes is inappropriate when applied to the complex world of human experience, relations and emotions.
Ron's book argues that the core of all religions is the spiritual experience which materialists either ignore or try to explain away.
The religious experience is the gateway to mysticism which leads to a non dualistic or holistic way of thinking.
This both and approach is the kind of thinking that invites the use of metaphor, symbol and paradox to integrate the complex realities of life.
Furthermore, this inclusive approach is necessary to understand the writings of the world's wisdom traditions.
Ron, welcome to Padmasana.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Well, thank you. It's my pleasure to be here.
This is a topic that has been something I have been studying and working on for years and it's great to talk about it.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Ron, in the foreword of your book the Mystic Spirituality in the Age of Materialism, you describe a spiritual experience you had at the age of 16 in a wintry forest. Would you mind sharing the details of that experience?
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Well, I'll try. The details are hard to describe, but let me go through the background and then see how I can do.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Sounds good.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: I lived in New Jersey at that time in the suburbs in New Jersey. The town I was in was in the outer limits of the New York suburbs and there were some fairly extensive forested areas that were still surviving from all the developments. And that year was a particularly snowy year. I don't think they've had a snowy year quite like that since.
And we had several snowstorms and I remember the snowstorm I was thinking about, I can't remember quite what year it was.
It was a good snowstorm. It was sort of shin deep snow and I was, I've been reading Thoreau and he talked about being a sort of going out and investigating the storms as they went by. So I went out and I investigated this storm. It was about a mile walk from my house to where the forest was. And I remember walking through the forest. What's really, really interesting when you walk through snowstorms at night is that it's quite light.
It first dispersed whatever light there is you. I didn't need a flashlight and I was walking around through the forest enjoying the snow. It was just falling around me.
What the snow does in that kind of environment is it really muffles all the sounds so there's no car noise or anything. I could distinctly hear the very, very faint of the snow as it fell.
So I was walking along in this environment and I realized that every snowflake is unique.
And as a result of that I had.
I was surrounded by an infinite Mass of unique snowflakes, that sense of infinite sort of just expanded almost. I don't say blew up, but it expanded to the point that all I could see around me was this bright light. What was the snow, the forest and everything else disappeared. And for a moment, and I don't think it was more than a couple of seconds, I was immersed in this bright light.
And when I finally came to, or when it eventually dissipated, I found myself on the knee, my knees in the snow, and I got up and went, wow. And walked home.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Sure, sure.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: I really did not speak about that for years.
In fact, I really didn't speak about that until I included that in my book, which was published in 2019.
I think because the people I was associated with in high school were scientists like me or budding scientists, and stuff like this would make no sense to them, but it made a lot of sense to me.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: Sure.
Why do you think that was, Ron?
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Well, I don't know. One of the things that I noted in the writings about religious experiences is that although they are very difficult to explain, when a person has undergone that experience, it is very profoundly important to them.
In other words, the experience itself means something, even if it's difficult to explain it. I mean, what I explained to you is sort of, okay, this is what happened, but the feeling, the sensations and everything just were essentially beyond description.
And the, the fact that I consider it a profound event is very typical of people who have had religious experiences that they, even if it's not explicable, they know something important happened.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Ah, of course, of course. And I think there's a lot of those stories. And so there's a common thread there for sure. Yeah, interesting. So early in the book, Ron, you were careful to explain how you're defining materialism.
How should listeners understand this term within the context of your book and the discussion we're having?
[00:09:39] Speaker B: That's a good point. Because the word materialism has really two uses, two connotations.
Most of the time in everyday language, when you talk about so and so being a materialist, this is someone who is made happy, maybe only made happy by getting some new jewelry or a new car or something, something material that makes them feel better than others around them or something. And that's not the term I'm using for materialism.
The metaphysical term of materialism sort of describes a concept that there is nothing this reality in which we're immersed considers. It's consisted only of things that you can see, feel, or measure. There's nothing out there beyond that. Is Not a solid physical feature that you can see every day.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Nothing beyond the senses.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Nothing beyond the senses. You know, we know that electrons exist because we can measure them.
But 20 years ago, electrons are a bit mysterious.
So you can measure some things that we now know exist even if we can't see them.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. So in your book, you also touch on two different views of reality that exist in materialism and spirituality. Can you elaborate on these two different views or how they lead to two different ways of thinking?
[00:11:15] Speaker B: If you're.
If you've had spiritual experiences, people. Well, let's put it this way. People who have had spiritual experiences consider that there is a spiritual dimension out there that pervades everything that's beyond everything.
You only encounter it occasionally.
Some people don't account it at all, but it's there. So it's the most important thing in the world around us.
Christians would call that God.
Creatures or life usually manifest some aspect of that consciousness.
Or let's put it this way, our consciousness that we have is a manifestation of that spiritual realm.
And therefore, since animals also have some aspect of the consciousness, life is more. More important than the matter around us. Matter being essentially just matter, is the least important aspect of the universe. Life comes next, and then the most important thing is consciousness.
For materialists, it's entirely. For them, there's nothing important in the world except for the material world.
But if you poke around in the material world, you find things that are alive.
So there have to be living beings that are of a different importance than the material world around us, but obviously much less.
And then consciousness might only exist in human beings, and it may not be really important. It may just be some sort of phenomenon that occurs in our brain, that is neuro. So our consciousness is least important, and the material world is most important to materialists.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: In a way, this reminds me of a quote from Yoda from Star Wars. Luminous beings are we not this crude matter? That's where I find my thoughts going in this part of the discussion. So, yeah, thanks, Ron. So, yeah, in your book, you review the many spiritual experiences that have been described across religious traditions over the years. How does all this relate to spirituality in the current age of materialism that you discuss in your book?
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Most of the religious experiences that I describe came from this book by William James, the Varieties of Religious Experiences that was published in 1909. And although it's obviously more than a century old, it's still the best book on the subject. And he notes that religious experiences range from simple emotional realizations to visual, auditory, or both visual and auditory experiences. Also, some experiences involve trance like states, probably the most famous one being what happened to Muhammad as he wrote the Quran.
He had several experiences where he was in a trance like state which was, from what I read was not terribly pleasant. But the result of that afterwards he wrote essentially the manuscripts of the Quran.
The Quran alone manifests evidence that there's a spiritual experience.
So materialists would say there are two ways to view the world. There's the irrational thought which makes up religion.
It just fits itself in with whatever the mythology happens to be. Well, there's a rational thought. So in their view the people who believe in religion are irrational.
So, or people who, let's put it a better way, people who believe their religious experiences are pointing to something which is beyond the physical realm or irrational, because in their view, if you use rational thinking, you're not going to find anything beyond the rational.
What they don't realize is that probably within the last 10 or 20 years there's another field of thought which is called transrational, which means beyond rational, where one can use rational thought to worry about or to understand and describe the physical reality and sort of a spiritual non rational thought to describe the experiences one has through religious experiences.
So just the fact that one has rational thinking doesn't mean that the experiences one has to that are beyond rational are not valid.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: That's interesting. So later on in the book you also dive into the nature of religion itself.
And this includes eight features that have been found to be common in all religions.
What are these eight features and what could be understood from these commonalities across the world's faith traditions?
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Ron so these eight qualities arose from what is called the Snowmass Conference, where religious leaders from faiths across the world met at Snowmass Monastery in Colorado to sort of discuss those similarities or their commonalities over the years. This conference began in 1984 and over the years they met in several other venues, but it still was given the name the Snowmass Conference. So the first step obviously is the world religions bear witness to to the experience of the ultimate reality.
And they give that ultimate reality the name Allah or the absolute God, the Great Spirit. The key thing here is the word experience.
In other words, right from the word go, they're talking about the fact that religions are based upon experiences. And the experience such as I had in the New Jersey woods In the wintertime 60 years ago is a good example of the starting point. Another very important point is that this ultimate reality cannot be Limited by any name or concept. It's beyond concepts and it's beyond words.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: That seems like a difficult concept to grasp for some people, wouldn't you say?
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Oh, it's extremely difficult because you cannot describe religion or religious experiences without concepts.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: So in other words, you have to realize that the words you're talking about are trying to point to an experience that's beyond words.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: It's kind of like a fault in the wiring of human communication, perhaps. Right.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: It's very difficult. Another one is ultimate reality is a ground of potentiality and actualization. In other words, much more creative. Creativity, insight, and consciousness indeed itself comes from the ultimate reality. A lot of religions will talk about transcendent versus eminent spirituality. In other words, God in Christian terms has a transcendent aspect which is beyond you and an imminent aspect which is within you.
So that consciousness, creativity, and everything comes within you is an aspect of that ultimate reality. Then the fourth is that faith is the opening, accepting and responding to ultimate reality. And in this sense, it's the opposite or precedes every belief system, because faith is being open to that experience, whereas belief is taking that experience and solidifying it into a sense. A series of symbols and plenty of.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Symbols across the world's traditions.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: Right. And there's all sorts of symbols and.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: Some common symbols across traditions.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: There's common symbols and there's different symbols. And the point is that the symbols are just trying to point at something which is beyond words. So if you believe in the symbols as being the indication of that's what is God, for example, then you are missing the point.
The potential for human wholeness or enlightenment, salvation, transcendent. Whatever word they want to put in their religion is present in every human being.
It is not restricted to any race, ethnic group or any religion. And it also means that, which is a very Christian term, is that no being is beyond salvation.
No matter how much they look like a drunken, worthless person, they still have a value in them. They can respond to the ultimate reality. And another thing is ultimate reality can be experienced not only through religious practice, but through nature, art, human relationships and service to others. And that, of course, is exactly what happened to me.
I was raised as a total atheist.
And in that one experience in the woods in New Jersey, I learned that there's something beyond the physical world.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Or the material realm.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
And as long as a person keeps his life divorced from ultimate reality, it is subject to ignorance and weakness and suffering and stuff like that. I mean, the first noble troop truth in Buddhism is life is Suffering. And that sounds really, really depressing, but what it implying that until you realize the nature of yourself, you're essentially prone to suffering. Things will happen that you won't particularly like.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Yep. Outside air control. And you'll have to process it one way or the other.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Right.
And finally, the last one is a disciplined practice is essential to spiritual life.
Yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one's own efforts.
This is where the Christian word grace comes in. It appears out of nowhere. It has nothing to do with your own efforts. Of course. You know, in my experience in the woods, I was not doing any spiritual work.
In fact, you know, I was an atheist and so, yeah, it just kind of occurred. Basically. You might be open to having all these experiences independent of any religious beliefs and everything.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Interesting stuff for sure.
This part of the discussion, it kind of has me thinking about the similarities more so than the differences across the world, the world's faith traditions, and how that maybe is in parallel with our. The human species natural predisposition towards tribal behavior. And it's just kind of like a matter of reconciling those two. Two things. Do you have a thought on that?
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Well, absolutely, because part of our problems is the assumption that since I believe in this religion, it's got to be the best one, you know, and not. Not a very subtle egotistical view of things.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: No, not at all.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Nah.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: No interesting stuff. We'll be right back to discuss the efficacy of science and its conflict with spirituality after the break.
Hey listeners, if you haven't already, please be sure to check out the many ways you can Support
[email protected] support.
You can become a Padmasana plus member for extra perks. Donate to the show and find information about sharing feedback, reviews and connecting to other fans of the show.
Visit podmasana.com that's P O D M A S A N A dot com support.
Thank you.
All right, Ron, chapter six of your book deals with the efficacy of science and the supposed conflict between science and religion.
Is there a conflict?
Does there have to be?
[00:23:45] Speaker B: There doesn't have to be.
One of our big problems of the age of materialism is that religion became materialistic too.
In the Middle Ages, it was quite clear that the scriptures essentially were allegories and metaphors.
There are things to lead you toward the experience rather than things to believe.
But belief came about when science began to describe the world and essentially tear it apart and put it together with theories and stuff like that. You had to believe that two plus two is Equal to four. So what happened is to make faith solid in this environment, people began to consider that the scriptures were solid facts and that to have religion you had to believe those solid facts. Well, if you believe that the book of Genesis is solid fact and that the Earth is only 4,000 years old, then you consider science to be something unholy that's there to destroy a person's faith in the Bible.
So that's a very major reason why the fundamentalists were fighting the whole concept of evolution.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Do you think that there's a trend in modern times away from this sense of conflict?
[00:25:17] Speaker B: Well, one thing, one of the themes in my book is precisely that, that since, let's say since the 60s, we've been seeing more and more meditation and non informal practices. By informal, I mean practices that, that are not tied to a specific set of dogma. Meditation appeared in the west probably in the late 60s, early 70s, both with TM, transcendental meditation, which is mostly Hindu, with a lot of Buddhist teachers appearing.
And then in response to that, not quite a decade later, contemplative prayer and centering prayer evolved in the Catholic Church.
Almost in an answer to that, to the fact that there's a process called centering prayer, which is very much like meditation.
It's watching your mind as it operates rather than trying to pray to God to have him give you a whole bunch of money.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: Sure, sure, yeah. And that behavior maybe even exists in.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: A few religions now. There's a substantial contemplative practice and I think that is in response to this very solid and to me, negative aspects of many aspects of fundamentalism.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: So in chapter six, you also describe the philosophical basis for science and its interesting connection to Judeo Christian beliefs. Could you expand or summarize that for us?
[00:26:58] Speaker B: Yeah. In the world of philosophy, there is a set of beliefs called idealism in which the whole concept is that nothing exists outside of your mind.
What you see out there in the world around you are things you think you see. It's just your mind.
The Judeo Christian religion is very much not like that.
It has, I would say, four concepts that fit very well with science. And one is that there's a real world out there to be studied.
You know, there's not just your mind operating, there's a real world out there.
The physical universe has uniformity and unity. The world is orderly and rational.
And that order and that rationality is open to development of the human mind or the study by the human mind. So those points fit perfectly well with the whole idea of science. Which is take rational thought and make sense of what's going on out there in the physical world.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: You also discuss some scientific paradigms in the book, the role creativity can play in science, and how scientific research is based purely on logical reasoning. How does this discussion relate to how spiritual, spiritual or materialistic views can be different or similar?
[00:28:29] Speaker B: Well, in that question you asked earlier about whether religion and science are incompatible, I should have brought up the fact that many scientists who are very strongly materialistic would say that there's no rational reason to call upon the existence of a God because they can describe everything with their rational models.
Right. The trouble is that there's ample evidence out there that science is not totally rational.
It's a process that's built up by thoughts and concepts, but also built up with dreams and other things. And so I have two good examples of why they don't work. I mean, one is paradigms.
All science is built upon paradigms.
Or if you go to school to study, let's say, physics, as you study the physics, those paradigms are implicit in what you're studying.
And the evolution of science involves essentially the revolution of paradigms, changing the paradigms.
A paradigm is essentially the framework in which that science has been developed.
And I like to use a good example of that is Earth science. Previous to 1912, you know, the Earth was considered to be just nothing happened.
The continents came up and went down and seas came and went and mountains came and went. But there is no sense of plate tectonics that we have today. And when Wegener came up with the idea that the continents used to be connected and they've drifted apart, it was revolutionary and very much debated. It took nearly 50 years for this idea of continental drift to essentially gain some degree of acceptance.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: That's so interesting. You know, modern people, they just accept it as, you know, fact.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: As fact. But if you look at the continents, they look like giant jigsaw puzzle pieces. And if you could push them together, they'd all fit.
And not only that, if you fit those pieces together, you would see that a mountain range on one side of the pieces, continued on the other side.
The geology was actually compatible across these. These fits. So Wegener wrote that up, and it was not accepted at all. It was thought to be crazy, because how can the continents move?
They're stuck in there. You know, there's. There's solid rocks in the ocean, and it's not like they're drifting on top of some water.
So it was a huge debate.
And then in the 60s, they started doing drilling on the ocean floors, and they found out that the ocean floor was very, very young.
In fact, as they worked, they found out that in the middle of each of the oceans, there is a place where there's fresh magma coming up continually, and the magma is making the oceans wider continually.
So this concept of continental drift suddenly said, wait, wait a minute. We have a process where the continents can move apart. And suddenly this all got put together into the field of plate tectonics. Now, if you were to write a paper today, say that the continents never moved, it'd be considered completely stupid, right?
But if you said the same paper 100 years ago, there'll be people who say, yeah, you're right.
So paradigms change over time. And as they change, things that used to be crazy become sensible, and things that used to be sensible come crazy. And that is not fast based upon reason so much as the way people have framed the science frame of science inside of a bunch of concepts that are so much inherent that sometimes people don't even question them.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: There definitely seems to be some unique quirks to how humans interpret information over time.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: And what I really like is the whole concept of creativity, because the reason why universities have a college of Arts and sciences, they lump arts and sciences together is both of them are based upon correct creativity.
Creativity has nothing to do with that rational thinking.
The story I like the best is about the story about the. The benzene ring, which I think it was in the 18.
I think it was late 1840s, okay? This fella, Frederick Kukla, this German chemist, was worrying about benzene rings.
What they could do by then is they could take a chemical compound and know what elements it's made of.
So they knew at the time that there's a hexane had 6 hydrogen, 6 carbons, and 12 oxygens.
And here is this benzene that had 6 carbons and 6 hydrogens. So what is making that different from hexane?
So he labored over this, and then he wrote some time about as he was working at his desk, he fell asleep, and then he dreamed about a snake that was crawling along. And suddenly the snake grabbed his tail in his mouth and started rolling.
And he woke up and immediately went to work on it because he knew what he was saying.
And he realized that the reason why the benzene has fewer hydrogens than hexane is because benzene, the carbons are in a ring, not in a chain. And there's only the six carbons tied to six carbons. And then the extra bond goes to the six hydrogens around the outside of the ring.
And so people say that was the birth of organic chemistry and it's based entirely upon a dream.
Yeah, that's right.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: That's a fascinating connection. Yep.
[00:34:44] Speaker B: It's not that rational thought all the time. There's creativity involved that is based on things which you come from outside of that rationality.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's interesting to think where that creativity comes from for sure.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Right, exactly.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: You mention in the book, Ron, that the term neurotheology is broadly defined as the study of the interaction, interaction between religious experiences and the human brain.
According to the term neurotheology, in what ways does a spiritual or religious practice influence the human brain itself?
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Well, what they have found, for example, is that people who are doing, undergoing a religious experience or meditating have a very different wave pattern in their brain and that people who have had seizures in certain parts of their brain have experiences that are close to religious experiences.
Some people said, well, Muhammad wrote the Quran because it was an epileptic. He had all these epileptic seizures. There is no evidence at all that that was happening to him.
So there's this big debate, there's many, many, many papers written on this in which they try to say which part of the brain is the God centered.
In which part of the brain would electronic activity, for example, produce religious experiences?
And then there's a bunch of papers that say the brain is intimately connected with all sorts of wiring and that religious experiences have to be across the brain.
So it's a matter of great dispute, partially because neurotheology has been used by atheists to say that there is no spiritual world out there. Essentially it's just chemical reactions in your.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Brain picking up on that. Should neurotheology be seen as a valid field of science? I mean, as someone who has a foot in the spiritual realms and the scientific realm throughout the course of your life, should it be seen as a valid field of science? And if so, why?
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Well, I think so, because if you took someone who was undergoing deep meditation and you did a brain scan on them, you would find the brain scan is very different from someone who is, let's say, doing math or just reading a book so that the question of how the religious experiences are manifest in the brain is a very valid scientific question.
Problem is, the whole thing of correlation does not prove causality.
The assumption that these reactions in the brain, the religious experience, is no more valid than saying the religious experience produces these reactions in the brain.
So if you just consider neurotheology as A study of how the brain reacts to these stimuli, which is valid for all stimuli, valid empirical science.
But if you're trying to use it as a way to say this is how religion evolved in human beings, then it is wrong because you cannot say with any sense of definity whether experiences produce the brain images or whether the brain images produce the experiences.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: That's an interesting thing to contemplate for sure. We'll be right back to discuss atheism and spirituality, yoga and its influence on other religions, what similar religious practices can teach us about evolution and what the future of human spirituality looks like in an increasingly technological world. This is Brenda Knorr and you're listening to Padmasana.
So Ron, in the book you talk about how atheists can sometimes view spiritual people as childish and religious experiences as some form of psychosis. As you said earlier, nothing more than chemical or electrical reactions in the brain. What do you make of this atheistic perspective towards spirituality or people who practice spirituality or state that they are spiritual?
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Well, I've already mentioned the thing that one thing that has happened since, well, since the 70s, I don't know when it was developed was the concept of transrational thinking. In other words, the fact that we have trans rational thinking means that people can be totally rational in one aspect and be religious in another aspect. And it gets rid of that sense of childishness. Because when atheists or materialists are thinking about these childish beliefs and everything, they're assuming that there's only two there's a rational thing where adults use and then there's this childish non rational thing which people use when they talk about their experiences.
And when you realize that both can be true, the immediate assumption that these people are childish and really not, not up to operation in this world is just not valid.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: From what I've perceived there's a decent sized secular Buddhist population out there. That's kind of the brand. It's essentially adopting practices typically closely associated with Buddhism but absent various other religious doctrines. And maybe this is seen as somewhat of a bridge. That's kind of a good segue to my next question. Ro, can an atheistic perspective and a spiritual perspective be reconciled? I think we're touching on it. But is there an overlap here? Can science and spirituality coexist?
[00:40:43] Speaker B: Oh yes, absolutely. But the thing is, I mean one of the funny things is that Buddhism is non theistic people would call atheistic because it has no God. It does show that there is a spiritual dimension to the world. They just don't give it a personality and I think that's part of the reason why the practices of Buddhism have become widespread here, because you don't have to believe in a deity out there who's going to protect you in anything. Doing those practices will help you integrate your mind with the rest of the world.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: When discussing the practices of various religions in your book Run, you spend a fair amount of time actually describing yoga, its history, its influence on other religions and its evolution in the West. In your view, where does yoga reside in the discussion of human spirituality?
[00:41:49] Speaker B: Well, if you're a Hindu, you would say it's absolutely basic to it. It's a core component of it is a process. See, in Western society, yoga is commonly considered a type of exercises, whereas in Hinduism and Buddhism, which uses it as well, yoga is considered to be a process of studying how your mind and body are interacting.
It's sort of a key to that.
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Right, Definitely.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Related to the fascinating thing now is that they're introducing yoga to also to Christianity, Christian religions. I don't know if they're introducing Jewish religions, but St. Matthew's Cathedral now in Laramie, they have a yoga session once a month at the church.
Because yoga, again, you're just looking how your body and mind interact. It's not tied to any deity and therefore it can be accepted by all sorts of religions.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And so as you touched on, the practice of yoga is now not that uncommon, maybe at a church or another place of worship. And you also mentioned in your book how other practices such as meditation, contemplation, prayer, ritual, scripture, and this concept of surrender exist across different religions from around the world. So how should we understand this, Ron, from an evolutionary perspective?
[00:43:29] Speaker B: Well, that's very interesting. Yeah.
Because I'm a geologist.
[00:43:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Evolution is part of geology. But the interesting point is that what we've done in this world in the past, again, it's not that it's. Well, within my lifetime is that they've presence.
Because the world now involves a almost instantaneous travel from east to west between countries, religions are interacting in a very similar way. And because of that, the religions can accommodate other practices from other religions.
So interfaith is very much of a very big thing in modern religious thinking.
I mean, I think that maybe I shouldn't go here, but I think the big response from the Trumpists is partially related to the fact that other religions are becoming commonly accepted in Western society.
And that's, that's just obeying the rules of God.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: Well, sure. And back to tribalism. Right. You know, earlier, earlier part of the discussion is like how this kind of just meshes with like the species predisposition to tribal behavior, while also thoughts and practices are. Have all have long been in parallel and are becoming more immersed.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: A very strong interfaith movement these days. To make it clear then, the practices are very similar and that the differences are in the concepts, not in the practices.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: Yes, yes, that important distinction. Yeah, yeah, I like that point.
So, Ron, you conclude your book with an exploration of how the industrial revolution shaped today's materialist worldview. As we stand on the cusp of an AI driven transformation, do you see humanity experiencing a parallel spiritual awakening? What does the future of human spirituality look like in an increasingly technological world?
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Well, I think one of the things of materialism and part of the reasons why we have all sorts of problems like climate change, the fact that the resources are getting more and more valuable and more and more difficult to get, the fact that there's so much poverty in this world all tied to the materialistic worldview when the only thing of really value is money or material stuff. So it's just fine to take people and turn them into, what should we say, second class citizens so you can make things cheaper and sell them to the third world with more profit.
And I think that the thing that has to arise from it will be a more spiritual view of the world.
But I think that's what the rise of meditation and the rise of interfaith interactions is telling us.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it's almost happening, you know, simultaneously maybe to keep things in balance.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I like to say it's happening under the radar. Yeah, I like that too, that things are happening. I mean, kids learn meditation in second grade.
They use meditation in businesses to reduce stress and stuff like that.
That's all. Learning those processes to make use of them in modern stressful environments.
Now the next step is taking the commonality of all those religions and making it part of our societal realization.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: Well, Ron, thank you very much for being on Padmasana.
[00:47:20] Speaker B: Well, thank you for having me.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: What do you think about spirituality's place in an age of materialism? Did you like this episode?
Send us your feedback via
[email protected].
you can also leave us a review on your podcast listening platform or reach out to us on the socials. We're on bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram and Threads. If you're a Padmasana plus member at the wisdom seeker level or higher, you can also join the weekly discussion about this episode with me and other listeners.
See you next time on Padmasana.
